The invention concerns a process for the production of a dental implant, wherein the tooth root region of a natural tooth, which region has been removed from a tooth socket or the like cavity in the jaw, is copied or modelled on an implant blank comprising a biologically compatible, non-resorbable material, wherein the modelling operation is effected in particular by copy-milling.
The most widely varying forms of industrially produced implants are known in implantology.
In order to place such cylindrical, screw or sheet implants in the jaw, dimensionally accurate artificial root sockets or cavities must be milled into the jaw, using milling cutters which are congruent in respect of shape. The success of that operation depends directly on the osseous healing of the implants in position, so-called genuine osseointegration. That can occur only if there is a gap-free contact between the jawbone and the implant. If that is not the case connective tissue grows into that gap and, like an insulating layer, prevents the osseous jaw/implant connection from being made.
When a tooth is drawn from a patient, it is possible for a ready-made implant to be fitted as an mediate implant into the tooth socket from which the tooth has been removed and which is now empty, in the hope that the new implant will grow fixed therein.
German laid-open application (DE-OS) No 27 29 969 describes the insertion of an implant which is substantially modelled on or is a copy of the removed tooth. It can be seen from the journal "Dental-Labor" (XXXVIII, issue 11/90), that such a configuration of a blank can be produced--for example from titanium--by a procedure involving copy-milling.
In the process for modelling or copying the root of the removed tooth by means of copy-milling from metal or ceramic material and using it as an immediate implant, it has been found that, before implantation into a natural tooth socket, the connective tissue which naturally occurs there has to be removed by being scraped out or curetted. As a result of that measure and mechanical enlargement of the tooth socket in the extraction procedure, the original tooth socket is changed in such a way that it is not possible to produce a usable implant by means of a copy of the extracted tooth.